OK, it’s Penguin Day again! Those who have been spying via the  Twitter feed would’ve noticed quite a few feeds formatted as a Git commit as well as some references to project ThoughtScore and POSE2. I do believe I’ve talked about those two projects of mine before, but always pretty vaguely. So I’ve decided to dedicate today’s post to clarifying a few things, as well as to provide some useful insight into what I’ve been up to.

POSE2, what? Where? I thought it died?

Let’s start with POSE2. E2-Productions was the name of my original site, and it still is. E2-Productions serves as the face of my online freelancing events, and it is the name I go under. thinkMoult was started to define the separation between professional services I provide and the fun activities I indulge myself in. POSE2 stands for Project Open Source E2. It originally referred to the similarly named “POSE2 PHP Framework” which was a freely available (hence open-source) MVC framework I made to faciliate future development of E2. However, as POSE2 developed, it stood to become any main website of which I would document the progress of and show people snapshots of development. Therefore, the first POSE2 project that emerged after the POSE2 framework was mature enough for development (about version 1.1) was E2 version 6, which over time split from the main E2 site to become VisionBin. Though VisionBin was actually closed-source (no such thing as an open source website as such!) it represented a huge learning curve, of which I duly shared with others.

Those who were around the release of VisionBin witnessed a sudden surge of popularity…then a sudden drop and eventual death of VisionBin. Right now another project is replacing VisionBin (with some similarities and some differences) and so that is what POSE2 now refers to. I’m making much more of an effort on this one, and hence one of the differences outsiders can notice is that it’s now version controlled/tracked by Git. This way you guys can always check up on my progress via the Twitter feed. I would use Github if it was open-source, but unfortunately not. For those unfamiliar with Git, the Twitter update gives a short summary of what I’ve updated, as well as how many lines of code I’ve inserted/deleted. So over the past week, I think I’ve given a general idea of “hey, I’m making massive progress!” – and pretty soon I will be welcoming alpha testers. Anybody who is interested in testing out the website should contact me and make sure you can stick on the IRC channel #gisklm on irc.freenode.net as it’ll be easiest to discuss/contact there.

Project ThoughtScore, the one that’s taking ages.

Yes. It IS taking ages. That’s the whole point of it. (no, not really) For the uninitiated, ThoughtScore is the name of the movie I am making. This is an animated movie. It is 3D…and it’s probably a thousand times more open-source than POSE2. Firstly because only open-source software will be used in its production (Blender, Linux, FFMPEG, Audacity, GIMP), secondly because I will release all the source files when I’m done, and finally because I am documenting my progress publicly. I haven’t touched Blender in more than half a year, so now I am coming back to continue on this project. I’m actually doing the animation now, and I’ve got a decent amount of material ready to work on the first two minutes of animation. (Which is a long time – actually). Those who lurk in the IRC channel #gisklm would have already seen some of these, but I’ve decided to post them up here just to make this post a bit more picture friendly. Here goes:

That is a picture of the second scene in the movie. It is the transport pod being launched. It is an early render, and there are many modifications to be made and even more work to be done to animate it.

I want to get involved and stay up to date – how’d I do this?

Right, my Twitter feed occasionally gives summaries on what I’m up to, and I also post my Git commits over there. However, there is still a lot of stuff that goes unheard of on Twitter, and most of these are test renders for ThoughtScore, simple questions on “hey, any suggestions for this?” or even general trash on what’s the latest joke that’s going around. To enjoy these, I’ve started up the #gisklm channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC server. For those wanting to check it out, download an IRC client such as XChat or HydraIRC (on windows), Colloquy (for mac), or XChat or irssi (for Linux). To join, first connect to the IRC freenode.net server (it’s different for each client, but find some way to connect to the freenode.net server – the command for it is `/server irc.freenode.net`) then join the #gisklm channel – type the command `/join #gisklm`. To change your nickname, try `/nick my_new_nick`. Note: alpha testers for the new POSE2 are required to be on the IRC, it’s a bit annoying to find you otherwise.